WINCHELL, WALTER 1897-1972

Columnist

Gossip

The claim that Walter Winchell created the modern gossip column has been disputed, but he was indisputably the most widely known and widely read columnist in American journalism. By various estimates the readers of his column and the listeners to his radio broadcasts totaled between 25 million and 50 million at the peak of his fame.

Show Biz

Raised in poverty in Manhattan, Winchell left school in the sixth grade to become a vaudeville singer. He was a song-and-dance man in second-rate vaudeville circuits in 1919 when he began posting pages of gossip and news backstage. In 1922 he began writing the "Stage Whispers" news column for The Vaudeville News. This trade paper had a limited circulation, but it provided him connections with people who assisted his rise. His two early mentors were speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan and Mark Hellinger. A columnist and reporter on The Daily News, Hellinger is regarded as the first Broadway columnist; but sentimental vignettes—not gossip—were his stock in trade.

"On Broadway."

In 1924 Winchell moved to the Evening Graphic, a sensational tabloid owned by health faddist Bernarr Macfadden. The Graphic featured crime and scandal articles. Winchell's column, "Your Broadway and Mine," began as show-business news. In 1925 he inaugurated what became the recognizable Winchell format—short items of personal information about celebrities connected by dots: "It's a girl at the Carter de Havens.… Lenore Ulric paid $7 income tax.… Fanny Brice is betting on the horses at Belmont.… S. Jay Kaufman sails on the 16th via the Berengaria to be hitched to a Hungarian.… "The column proved so popular that Winchell was hired away by William Randolph Hearst's Daily Mirror, which was engaged in a struggle with the The Daily News for New York morning tabloid circulation. Many readers bought the Mirror just for Winchell's "On Broadway," and the column reached a peak syndication to 800 newspapers.

Winchellese

The content of "On Broadway" evolved away from bits of show-biz gossip. Winchell included items about politics and business, recommendations or dismissals of movies and books, and predictions; and he conducted his many bitter feuds in print. The material was expressed by means of a punning language that became known as Winchellese: "That Way" (in love), "Closerthanthis" (in love), "Infanticipate" (pregnant), "Chicagorilla" (gangster from Chicago), "Renovated" (divorced), "Phfft" (broken, ended, or spoiled) and "the Mister and Miseries" (marital difficulties). Some were coined by Winchell and some were provided by a growing cadre of contributors, but he accepted credit for all of the neologisms and thereby acquired a reputation as a language innovator and wit.

Influence

The influence of the column became prodigious. A favorable mention in Winchell could make a novel a bestt-seller; any mention in Winchell could make a person an instant celebrity. Moreover, Winchell's readership cut across several boundaries; he was read by subway straphangers and by intellectuals. Lyricist Lorenz Hart wrote: "I follow Winchell and read every line. That's why the lady is a tramp." Ernest Hemingway allegedly stated that "Winchell is the greatest newspaperman that ever lived." Inevitably, Winchell inspired a journalistic genre. His column was widely imitated as it became necessary for most papers—in and out of New York—to run a column of metropolitan gossip. Winchells clones included Ed Sullivan (his bitter enemy), Sidney Skolsky, Earl Wilson, and Leonard Lyons, but none came close to matching his influence.

Radio

Compulsively driven to seek more influence and more recognition, Winchell appeared in vaudeville and movies, but his greatest media exposure resulted from his weekly radio broadcasts that began in 1930. Opening with "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea," Winchell delivered items of the sort that appeared in his column at the rate of 227 words per minute punctuated by a clicking telegraph key to provide a sense of urgency.

Runyon Fund

Winchell developed a devoted friendship with Damon Runyon, another legendary newspaperman. When Runyon had lost the ability to speak and was dying of cancer, he and Winchell sat together in the Stork Club night after night. Winchell raised $32 million for the cancer research fund named for Runyon.

Times Change

During the 1930s Winchell embraced Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and denounced Hitler, thereby eliciting attacks as a radical from the right wing. When he became a strong foe of communism after the war, he was denounced as a fascist by the Left. By the end of the 1950s Winchell seemed old-fashioned. The world he had written about no longer existed; the things that had seemed scandalous were out in the open; his powerful friends were dead. His style and personality did not translate well into television broadcasting. Walter Winchell died in California without a column and without an audience.

Source:

Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Knopf, 1994).

WINCHELL, WALTER 1897-1972

Journalist, radio commentator

Controversial Columnist

Walter Winchell was the most famous, most popular, and most controversial "gossip" columnist in twentieth-century American journalism. He made a career of printing scoops about celebrities and making "informed" predictions (many of which did not come true). In the 1930s he also began to make partisan political pronouncements.

Background

Winchell was born in 1897 and left school in 1910 to work as a vaudeville performer. After years of minimal success he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1917 and worked in New York City as a receptionist for Adm. Marbury Johnston at the New York Customs House. In 1919 he returned to vaudeville and started a newsletter that featured light vaudeville news and punnish quips such as "You tell'em Quija, I'm bored." In 1922 the Vaudeville Newsy a paper run by a vaudeville circuit, hired Winchell at the salary of twenty-five dollars a week.

Journalism

In 1924 Winchell became a dramatic critic and Broadway columnist for the New York Evening Graphic. He worked for the Evening Graphic until 1929, his salary rising from one hundred dollars a week in the beginning to three hundred dollars a week before he left for William Randolph Hearst's New York Daily Mirror. The publishers of the Graphic credited Winchell with attracting 75,000 of its overall 350,000 subscribers.

A National Audience

The move to the Hearst newspaper gave Winchell a tremendous increase in salary. He was signed to the King Syndicate, which distributed features to more than 170 newspapers. His initial contract with King paid him $25,000 annually. Winchell used his national platform to improve the quality of his gossip. In the early 1930s he also started a weekly radio program, broadcast on Sunday night and sponsored by the Jergens Lotion Company. By the late 1930s he was earning in excess of $130,000 per year. Winchell's popularity was in no small measure due to his skill at language—he was a constant spouter of flashy phrases. Some of his linguistic creations include Joosh for Jewish, pash for Passion, shafts for legs, Wildeman for homosexual, and the Hardened Artery for Broadway.

Political Commentary

The national audience and his newfound prominence with political figures (he was staunchly pro-Roosevelt and a friend of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover) led him to begin take an interest in national and international affairs. Very early he denounced Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists. On 2 September 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, Winchell sent a cable to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain suggesting that the wording of the expected declaration of war be worded as a declaration of war against Hitler personally and not against Germany in general. When Chamberlain issued a statement worded in that way, Winchell wrote a column seeming to take credit for the distinction between Hitler and the German people.

A Popular and Trusted Reporter

The self-importance shown in the episode was typical of Winchell and a key to his success and his controversy. His audience of seven million readers and twenty million listeners considered him someone who would let them know what was really going on. During the Depression he was the voice and words of New York City, the entertainment center of the United States. Winchell's slangy language and his secret information made him a great entertainer in the guise of a reporter. In that sense he was a man ahead of his time.

Sources:

Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992);

St. Clair McKelway, Gossip: The Life and Times of Walter Winchell (New York: Viking, 1940).

Winchell, Walter [né Wincheles] (1897–1972), journalist. The most influential Broadway columnist of his day, he was born in New York and received some of his early training as a child vaudevillian. His staccato writing and similar delivery during his radio broadcasts, his often explosive innuendos, and curious “Winchellisms,” such as “infanticipating” for “pregnant,” earned him a huge following, and he was credited with saving a number of Broadway shows, most notably Hellzapoppin, from probable failure. Biography: Winchell, Bob Thomas, 1971.